Mrcaliche

Yes, this is the world of Social Media

Revisado: 10-15-24

To date I don't think I have read a Jason Parkin book that I haven't liked.
This book has biting social commentary about the ways our current society goes crazy about any one situation that gets trapped in the social media whirlwind.
Pargin has such a talent for Insanity that just escalates an escalates and escalates perfectly calibrated fever pitch that is often so ridiculous you feel both amused and uncomfortable because of how real it is.
I wholeheartedly recommend this book.

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A Slick Paranormal Mystery

Revisado: 06-18-24

Eric Wood has a knack for paranormal mysteries. This book takes you into a ghost town that isn't supposed to exist, but ghosts aren't all that's waiting for the characters.
This story was fun, engaging and a quick read with unexpected revelations throughout. I love the bits of lore built into this story.

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The best in the series (GET THIS NOW)

Revisado: 05-29-24

One of the things I mentioned in my review of the previous books, was how It always felt like this series was a death march. The characters, unlike in other zombie franchises, don't get to build a community that then crumbles, then they move to another community, that then crumbles, etc etc. from book 1 this has felt like these people can't stop long enough because the dead are always coming and they don't stop. This book in particular highlights that. It makes you feel the exhaustion of the characters, follow the by a non-stopping force which are the zombies. And even though there might be times of settling down for a while, the pacing of the book makes it feel like those times are fleeting in comparison to the oncoming horde.
There's so much creativity, thought, and inventiveness that goes into this book. Especially during the final big set piece. It feels overwhelming. where other series might have just had your nearly superhuman characters shoot (with the endless supply of bullets they seem to come upon during the zombie apocalypse for some reason) and hack through thousands of zombies over and over until they stop, with only side characters meeting their end, Morris gets creative. This feels researched, planned, thought out. This is people trying to survive by the skin of their teeth. And not all of them will survive of course. He set up this "Return of the King" level battle for survival since the past book. What others might have considered just a random bunch of characters meeting their end due to a natural disaster, is actually Mordor amassing their army.
I've enjoyed this series from book 1. And for anybody who didn't see that Morris had a clear vision going into this, this book is testament of just how clear his vision of his story was.

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Careful What You Wish For

Revisado: 05-17-24

I love stories with despicable characters that are trapped in their own decisions but continue doubling down on them. This atory is just that. It's cruel, brutal, violent, it will not feel pretty or sanitized and that's just the way it should be.
I did feel the narration felt a bit too "fairy-tale like" to truly fit the serious moments but it wasn't bad. The story more than made up for it.
You can disagree with a character's decisions, you can hate them for it, but it sure makes for an engaging story.

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Best in the series so far

Revisado: 02-14-24

Jacy Morris is firing on all cylinders with this one. Dark, grim, violent and creative. I love how it does away with contrived survival against things you know wouldn't be survivable. When you think "this is going to go bad" it does and then some. There's hope but just a glimmer and not for everyone. Especially with unexpected moments that catch you off guard even though they've been deftly set up.

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When you think it won't stick the landing, it totally does!

Revisado: 02-02-24

This book both celebrates and subverts the possession tropes. The fact that the apparently possessed character acts so calm and collected makes the horrifying moments that much worse. the author's restraint is what makes this book truly disturbing.
There was a moment near the end in which I thought Tremblay was about to screw up the ending by forcing a plot point that the buildup so far didn't support. It felt so forced, so wedged in, I thought "all that beautiful character work to pull this out of nowhere" but, nope. Tremblay manages to have his cake and eat it, too. He criticizes a famous bias in the possession genre and then swerves with dexterity into a beautifully disturbing ending that puts everything before into perspective.
Loved this book.

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Relentless, non-stop tension

Revisado: 11-14-23

We've all read or seen the average zombie story:
Outbreak, surviving, find safe place, maintain it for a while, safe place falls to zombies, go find another temporary safe place.

What I like about this and it's prequel is that, since it happened so early at the beginning of the outbreak, and it happens so fast and so chaotically, there is no maintaining a safe place for any considerable amount of time. I don't know what the next numbers in the series hold, but for the time being it's relentless and unforgiving, your characters feel like at any moment they might break under the stress or the exhaustion because they can barely stick around the safe spot for hours, or even less than a day before one zombie attracts a horde. For me that's one of the things that really make this title stand out: The idea that safety at this point is impossible even for a couple of days, and it's a long walk until you break down and fall, knowing the dead don't get tired.

It's a survival nightmare and I love it

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Excellent worldbuilding, lacking in plot

Revisado: 07-20-23

This book can either be an amazing listen or just sort of mediocre depending on the mindset with which you approach it.

If you approach this book as social commentary, it will be pretty lacking, and very superficial. The author tries to get a message across about "Eating meat is bad. Because the meat industry + capitalism are bad, so what if the meat was people." The problem is, I don't think any person with half a brain would consider eating and cannibalism to be the same or similar things. Nobody ever walked out of Soylent Green suddenly vegan. so this particular interpretation of the story was my least favorite, which is why I much preferred the other one...

If you look at this as a soft dystopian world building exercise, it's beautiful. While the plot itself is very thin because it only takes you from one vignette to the other being experienced by a main character whose questioning eating meat and seeing the barbaric practices done by the meat industry and related shady activities. The author questions how each of these things would work "If it were people" and does paint a very interesting world that I wish I could know more about, but this is a soft dystopia, so you get very rough drafts without much analysis of the reasons or the logic behind the things that are being done. You're being presented with horrifying, graphic, revolting situations which are more than worth the price of admission, but at times it just feels, again, like proposing "this but it's people".
It sounds like I'm being overly critical of the book, and it does deserve criticism for its thin plot, and not answering very very big questions of the world it creates, but that world is so interesting and so horrifying that I thoroughly enjoyed living in it for a while because of how much it appalled me.

Worth a read. Take off your social commentary hat. Enjoy the world building.

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Accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do.

Revisado: 05-29-23

Accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do.

I have a lot of reviews blasting this book for its subject matter. Or for the fact that it's a male author writing to lesbian characters. Honestly, people who are complaining about those two things are completely missing the point of this book. (And of writing, in the first place, people write to find the humanity in people other than who they are)

This book isn't about two lesbian characters. This book is about a character with serious emotional dependency meeting a character who is a sadist. Both characters are very damaged people creating a perfect storm of toxicity. These characters could have been a man and a woman, a woman and a man, or even two men, because what happens in the end of this book could have happened with either combination.

Also, this is a shock horror book, about these two people meeting in a way a lot of people meet nowadays, which lends itself to this type of unhealthy relationship in which all you know is what the other person writes, which can lead to idealizing the other person despite their toxic behavior.

Those two things considered, I really enjoyed this book for what it was, it was a short, disturbing, gross, disgusting horror read. It's a quick in and out horror that just leaves you wondering what the hell just happened? It starts out normal though skewed, then quickly spins into truly disturbing territory. If you don't have a strong stomach stay away, but knowing the sub genre of book you're getting into, you should already know what things to expect.

I do have one complaint about the book which did take me out of the narrative at times. The author chose to write this as a series of emails and chats, which is totally fine, and can work wonders to establish a story. The problem is that when you read what's supposed to be an email and the characters write these emails in a very "literary, narrative, descriptive" sort of way, it can take you away from the "realness" that having it be emails and chats is supposed to convey. People don't write emails like that. They just don't. The metaphors and flowery language used doesn't strike me as the real contenta of an email. Sure it's a license authors allow themselves, but it did take me out of it a bit. It almost feels like he could have just written this as prose and gotten a more immersive result.

That said, I thoroughly enjoyed the story for what it was. If you have the stomach for it. Dive in. It's very rewarding.

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A creative, fresh story in an overstuffed genre.

Revisado: 05-27-23

This book has ONE flaw, but it's still a 5-Star Book and you must read it. I'll tell you why.

The Good:
This Rotten World stands out from the crowd of repetitive zombie books by focusing on the one thing that others want to get through expediently.
Other zombie books give you a quick glimpse of the collapse and then focus on the world after, they focus on people surviving in a world that is already broken and has been broken for a long time, but This Rotten World lives in that space where other books don't find potential, this is a book that focuses on literally the very first days of the outbreak and sets a realistic approach to how and why everything fell apart.
By introducing individual chapters focusing on individual characters you can see the progression of the infection, so you can actually feel the confusion, the grief, the loss, the death, and the collapse of everything. The cool thing about this approach is that you are introduced to the characters that you're fairly certain are your cast of protagonists, but the secret is a lot of those characters are probably not going to make it past two chapters, and it becomes tense and intriguing to see who will actually make it to the end.
The novels approach to death is vicious, indiscriminate, and real. Not everybody that you expect to make it will necessarily make it, and when you think a certain character might go left, they might go right, which keeps the book consistently fresh.
I love that this is a book that is focused on the horror, and the character experience, not on giving you three pages of descriptions and stats on each weapon that they're going to use; I love The Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z, but this is not that, This is not a scientific and military analysis of the outbreak, This is people who find their lives changing irrevocably and trying to figure out what the hell is going on.

The Bad:
Literally only one thing. The "villain". I get what the author was going for: the kind of person with a tendency towards criminality, who breaks, and chooses chaos and destruction. And from a plot development standpoint it works and it horrifies and it pays off greatly, but at least for me, it felt a little abrupt. This character went from normal person in the middle of a catastrophe, to nihilistic Joker literally overnight. If there were actual signs of the tendency in this character, I did not pick up on it.
This is such a small complaint that it doesn't make me deduct any points from the story, especially because of the way that part of the story evolves, and the payoff that comes from it, but I did find myself a bit confused by the turn of events the moment the character suddenly woke up and chose chaos.

Verdict:
Tired of Zombie books? Aren't we all? Still, this one is completely worth your time and attention. This book feels like a response for people who feel everything has been done in the zombie subgenre.
Clever scenes, excellent character development, soul crushing events (one particular scene in which a character gets labeled a "saint" Is something I don't think I've ever seen in any zombie story, and it was both uplifting and so tragic it made me love it to death). There is another scene near the end that I think has been done somewhere, or hinted at, but I have never seen it done with as much gravitas and dignity and impact as would Jacy Morris did here.
I have read every zombie cliche in the world, and I found myself wanting to continue read this because it always gave me a reason to care, and that's something a lot of zombie books no longer do.
Read it now.

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